What It's Like When Steve Jobs Chews You Out For A Product Failure

In 2008, when Apple launched MobileMe, its own advanced email
system,
it was a dud.

It cost $100 annually, but there were syncing issues, and emails
were being lost. The Wall Street Journal's legendary tech guru,
Walt Mossberg, said he
couldn't recommend the service because it had "too many
flaws."

In response to the MobileMe flop, Steve Jobs assembled the team
that worked on the service and chewed them out, according to Adam
Lashinsky at Fortune, who has a big story on Apple, available
only on newsstands or the iPad right now.*

He gathered the troops at the auditorium Apple uses on its campus
to do demos of small products for the press.

He asked the team what MobileMe was supposed to do. Someone
answered, and Jobs said to that person (and everyone else), "So
why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

He continued, "You've tarnished Apple's reputation ... You should
hate each other for having let each other down ... Mossberg, our
friend, is no longer writing good things about us."

Right there and then he named a new executive to run the MobileMe
service.

Lashinsky says most of the team that built the original service
was disbanded.